Wednesday, March 27, 2019

27 March 2019 - the law, firm



Or what great nation has statutes and decrees
that are as just as this whole law
which I am setting before you today?

Are we grateful for the law of God? We should be.

Observe them carefully,
for thus will you give evidence
of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations

The law helps us to live well ordered lives. It helps us order our actions toward God's purpose in creating us. The moral law would be no less real if we didn't know it. Our actions would still have consequences but these would take us entirely by surprise. But we are blessed to know how these moral laws work. Knowing how gravity works prevents the frustration of trying

to fly like a bird merely by flapping our arms. Knowing how the moral law works similar prevents the frustrations of efforts that cannot bear fruit.

This is particularly plain in the fuss about the “negative” morality of the Ten Commandments. The truth is that the curtness of the Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion but of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things are forbidden. 
- GK Chesterton

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

Jesus is not changing the moral workings is the world. Rather he is making something entirely new possible even within the old framework. He fulfills the law and in doing so he makes it possible for us to fulfill the law as well.

By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (see Romans 8:3-4).

The issue with the law was that all it could do was make us aware of our guilt. But now the law always points toward the ever present possibility of walking according to the Spirit in a new kind of freedom, one which we do not use as an opportunity for the flesh.

But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments
will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.

Sometimes we think that evangelization ends with meeting Jesus. But clearly Jesus wants us to help others to know the law as well, so that they can fully experience the freedom that he died to give us.

He sends forth his command to the earth;
swiftly runs his word!


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